Note: The “it” that Israel has profaned is the name of the Lord (verse 11). This part of Malachi’s prophecy reveals that, from God’s perspective, to alter His way of worship is to show disrespect for Him. Israel’s priests did not think so, but they were profaning the name of God by failing to honor God’s table in the Temple. To God’s own priests, God’s way of worship had become wearisome. However, the truth was that they had grown tired of God’s way of worship, not because they were tired of performing ceremonies, but because they had grown tired of Him (Isa. 43:22). Other gods interested them more. Whenever God’s people grow weary in well-doing, it is evidence that they have grown weary of God Himself.

Shortly after this covenant began, most of those who believed in Christ grew tired of him. They grew tired of being misunderstood and persecuted; they grew tired of the reproach of Christ; they grew tired of not fitting in with the world. They traded their shout of victory for status among men. They left off the communion of the holy Ghost for the dead Christian communion service; they drifted away from the baptism of Christ to the more fashionable water baptisms that men could administer. The word of God became strange to them because they embraced the doctrines of men. The simple purity of holiness became an embarrassment to them because they had been seduced by appearances of good.

“The kingdom of God is righteousness and peace and joy” (Rom. 14:17). Are you tired of righteousness? Are you tired of peace? Are you tired of joy? If you don’t have those spiritual qualities in your life now, child of God, it can only be that somewhere along the way you grew tired of God and traded His gifts for something of this world. And by letting them go, you “despised the name of the Lord”. If you do have them, if you have held on to those treasures through all the things you have been through in this world, you have honored the name of the Lord.

Let’s not get tired of God; let’s get tired of ourselves. One brother in the Lord, many years ago now, broke down and wept as he said to me, “I’m so tired of making messes.” About once a year, through his own carelessness, he’d get himself into some sort of spiritual trouble, and he was going through one of those times. Unfortunately, he never got tired enough of himself to cease from his own ways, and not long after the day he broke down and cried with me, he made the biggest mess he had ever made, and fell away from Christ altogether. When we get tired enough of ourselves and the messes we make, we will repent and walk in the Spirit. Let’s get tired of ourselves and the messes we make, and lay hold on eternal life!

When I was in the seminary studying church history, I noticed that the only people in that thick history book with whom I felt any fellowship were some of the people whom churchmen called heretics. One group in Europe that seemed to be filled with the Spirit called their meetings “prophesyings”. Within a couple of generations after those in the original group passed away, the meetings were no longer called prophesyings, but lecturings. May God save us from degenerating from prophesying by the Spirit to the giving of lectures! I still can feel the fear of God that I felt when I read about that little group losing its power with God and renaming its meetings accordingly. The presence of God’s glory and power is what gives the body of Christ on earth its value and its distinction. Without that glory and that power, God’s people become just another worldly religious sect, despising the name of the Lord just like everybody else, only more guilty than the sinners who do it ignorantly.

The flesh is ashamed of the Spirit, and if you begin to walk in the flesh instead of the Spirit, you will find yourself ashamed of the power of God. But those who walk in the Spirit are ashamed of the flesh and its works. I would be ashamed to come into an assembly of saints so much in the flesh that I could not praise God. To practice water baptism or a dead communion ceremony would embarrass me. I rejoice in the works of Christ instead!

God promised that if we would keep our minds on Him, that is, on what He says and what He does, we would have perfect peace (Isa. 26:3). It is when our minds drift away from the works of God and we begin to partake of the carnal ways of man that divisions arise. That is when we begin to debate whether we should immerse or sprinkle with water; that is when divisions arise over whether we should hold communion once or twice a month, or if non-church members should partake with us. There are no such divisions in the holy Ghost. In the Spirit, Christ baptizes when he will, and he celebrates communion with faithful believers all the time. It is only in the flesh that divisions exist. There are no denominations in the holy Ghost; the word “denominations” is used by men to disguise what denominations really are: divisions contrary to the will of God.

God does not recognize denominations. He blesses His people wherever He finds them – as long as they are still humble enough to receive His blessings. And because God does not recognize denominations, His faithful servants do not recognize them. There is nothing about them that is holy; they are altogether the work of the flesh. They have no authority over the soul of any child of God, and when God’s children come to understand that, there will be an exodus out of Christianity that will make Moses jealous.

Note #1: Isn’t it revealing of the blindness of humankind that the Creator of heaven and earth has to tell us that He is great? God is not a braggart; it is for our sakes, not for His own benefit, that God makes it known that He is great. Jesus was “meek and lowly”, and he was also the “express image” of God’s person.

Note #2: God will never settle for a blemished sacrifice when He has commanded an unblemished one. If He did that, He would dishonor Himself, and in doing so, He would confuse us as to what kind of God He is. He loves us too much to negotiate with us about what kind of life we should be living. Because God loves us, His requirement for eternal life – obedience to His will – stands unchanged. No one will be saved in the end without a life of true holiness because no other way of living honors God (Heb. 12:14).

Malachi 2

Note #1: In this ancient carving, a king is putting out a captive’s eyes. In the carving, the captive is on his knees before the king. The king is holding a spear in one hand, and in the other he is holding a line attached to a hook that is in the captive’s lower lip. With that hook, the king is pulling the captive’s face up so that the king can use the spear to put out his eyes. That’s what God is referring to in verse 3 above. He is telling Israel that they will not be able to escape the dung that God will rub in their faces, implying that He will force them to hold their faces up so that He can do it.

The “dung” in this parable, God declares, is Israel’s holy feasts. Those feasts were ordained by God; they were a part of His law with which He blessed Israel at Mt. Sinai. Why, then, would God compare them to dung? The answer was revealed only when His Son was revealed.

Note #2: God honors us by even thinking about us. Realizing this, David and Job both asked God, “What is man, that you even think of him?” (Job 17:17–18; Ps. 8:4). It might at first seem that God is bringing too severe a punishment upon His disobedient people, but when God has honored us fallen creatures by making a way for us to be forgiven and to receive eternal life, for us then to treat the things of God with disdain is for us to deserve the worst of punishments.

The Son of God prayed that God would curse those in Israel who rejected him, and he prayed that God would turn their blessings into a trap, which included the blessings of their holy feasts. He prayed that the holy table in God’s temple would become a snare for them, that God would lock them into a spiritual prison with their ceremonies that they chose instead of the Son of God. Worshipping in dead ceremonies became the prison to which unbelieving Israelites were condemned, just as the Son of God had prayed.

Psalm 69

Of course, neither Malachi nor the rebellious priests dreamed of how that prayer in Psalm 69 would be fulfilled. We can see it because the Son of God has come and given us an understanding (1Jn. 5:20). Paul taught that the glory of God’s Son is so great that when he was revealed, the law of Moses lost all its glory.

2Corinthians 3

Note #3: When God moves out of a thing, it is sin to stay in it. God accepted the sacrifices and prayers of Abraham when he offered them to God on the high places of Canaan (Gen. 12:8). Later, however, God forbade His people to worship on Canaan’s high places but to worship Him in the one place He would choose (Dt. 12:1–7). Eventually, this lone acceptable place of worship was at His temple in Jerusalem (Ps. 78:67–69; 132:13). Later still, God moved out of the temple worship in Jerusalem just as He had moved out of the high places of Canaan (Jn. 4:21), and the only acceptable worship was changed to be “in spirit and in truth” (Jn. 4:23–24).

As long as God approved of worship on the high places of Canaan, worship on the high places could be “holy, just, and good”, and as long as He approved of worship at the temple, temple worship could be “holy, just, and good” (Rom. 7:12). And as long as God accepted those ways of worship, people who worshipped in those ways were blessed by God. Paul freely admitted that he benefitted from observing the law’s rites and obeying its moral commandments. But when Christ appeared to him and filled Paul with the Spirit of God, Paul came to consider that blessing to be of such glory that the law held no more attraction for him. In comparison to God’s grace, Paul saw even the law that God gave Moses as worthless – as worthless as dung. Paul listed some of the law’s glory in which he formerly boasted:

Philippians 3

Basking in “the surpassing glory” of Christ Jesus, Paul now considered to be worthless as dung the holy, physical circumcision that God commanded Abraham and his descendants to perform. Paul considered the glory of baptism in earthly water to have been done away with when Jesus’ baptism of the holy Spirit was poured out from heaven. He considered the glory of the law’s handwritten rules to have been done away with by the coming of the holy Spirit, which would guide men from within. He considered the holy days of the law to have become nothing; every day was alike to Paul because the glory of Christ was alive in Paul’s heart every day, and he was distressed when his Gentile converts began adding such things as physical circumcision, water baptism, lists of rules, and holy days to their worship in the Spirit.

Colossians 2

It grieved true prophets such as Malachi when they saw God’s people despise the way of worship revealed in the law. Today, it grieves true men of God, as it did Paul, to see God’s people despise worship that is “in spirit and in truth” by adding ceremonies to their worship. It is their calling in Christ to live a life that is beyond those fleshly things and to walk with their heavenly Father in “the newness of life”.

Note: There was a time in Israel’s history when God’s ministers (the Levitical priests) were in better spiritual condition than they were in Malachi’s time. They once feared God; they spoke the truth; they judged righteously; they turned souls away from sin and toward God’s law; and they had fellowship with God. They were true messengers of God to the people, and He was pleased with them.

Note: Israel’s priests robbed from the hearts of God’s people their confidence in the law God gave them by the hand of Moses. The sin of undermining the confidence in the Bible is still committed by God’s ministers whenever they follow modern theologians who labor under the spell of evolution when it comes to the origins of the scriptures. Hearts are robbed of saving faith by theories of biblical origins such as the oral tradition/Q-source theory for the origin of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and the JEDP theory for the origin of Old Testament books. Ministers of Christ who are led by the Spirit instead of by the flesh understand that. The Scriptures are inspired by God; they are not the product of man’s imagination, and they are, as Paul said, able to make us wise concerning salvation (2Tim. 3:15).

Note #1: God did not excuse His priests for turning away from His law or for turning others away from it. The priests during Malachi’s time were no longer applying the law’s judgments impartially because they no longer esteemed God’s revealed judgments to be sacred. Instead, they began using the law to their own benefit and the benefit of their friends.

Note #2: Because God’s ministers came to think of the things of God as contemptible, God made His ministers contemptible to His people. This is the eventual fate of every servant of God who forsakes the right way; the people they mislead and the people whose favor they curry will come to despise them. Solomon said that “a lying tongue hates those who are afflicted by it” (Prov. 26:28). In other words, it is love of self, not love of others, that inspires false teachers. But the opposite also is true; in time, those who are afflicted by a lying tongue will come to hate the liar who afflicted them.

On a broader scale, this principle holds true concerning the children of God who forsake the right way in order to be “like all the nations”; the ungodly people whom they admire and whose favor they curry will come to despise them. The spirits of this world whom unwise children of God follow instead of following the Spirit will, at some point, turn on them and plunder them. This is what happened to Israel after she forsook her heavenly Husband to take foreign gods as her “lovers”:

Jeremiah 30

Ezekiel 16

The very nations whose customs and gods Israel turned to and loved instead of her God, turned on her and destroyed her.

Note #3: From the beginning of His gracious work with man, God has struggled to persuade those whom He has chosen as His own to be content with the distinction of His grace. In the Old Testament, Israel was ashamed of the distinction of God’s grace but wanted to be “like all the nations”; in fact, they insisted upon being like all the nations (1Sam. 8:19–20). God gave in and let them try to be like the Gentile nations, and they tried very hard, but they could not hide the glory of the calling of God that was upon them. The heathen whom they admired always sensed the difference that God’s calling made in Israel, and they hated Israel because of it, no matter how hard Israel tried to be like them.

After God touches any person or group of people, those blessed souls can never again be like those whom God has never touched, no matter how hard they may try to be. And those whom they strive to be like can sense the invisible difference that is there. Solomon said that whatever God does is eternal (Eccl. 3:14), and that includes God’s touch on a man’s soul. The difference made by God’s touch is an eternal difference that cannot be removed; even death does not remove it.

In Christ, we have the power to do what sinners cannot do; that is, we have the power to walk uprightly before God. At the same time, that power enables us to be worse than the sinners around us if we forsake the right way and “return to our vomit”, to live again as sinners. Israel did this. The nation became so wicked when it turned from the law that they were “worse than the heathen” (2Chron. 33:9). Sometimes, even the heathen were embarrassed at Israel’s perverseness (Ezek. 16:27). But whenever God’s children forsake His ways, all they ever do is disgrace themselves. Once God has delivered us from sin and washed away our past, we cannot simply return to sin and be only as sinful as we once were; we must be worse. Much worse. Jesus taught this (Lk. 11:24–26), and so did Peter:

2Peter 2

If a believer turns from righteousness to an ungodly lifestyle, it is a testimony against Christ, just as a righteous life is a testimony for him. Those who see a child of God living a righteous life will think more highly of God (Mt. 5:16), and those who see a child of God doing evil will think less of Him. Whenever those who belong to God turn away from righteousness and begin to live an ungodly lifestyle, they bring the name of God into disrepute. In Malachi’s time, the wickedness of God’s chosen people included, as apostasy always does, two things that are closely related: (1) worshipping God the wrong way and (2) ungodly relationships with those who were not in covenant with God. These two sins the prophets were never able to persuade Israel as a whole to renounce.

Note #1: Malachi points out to his fellow Israelites that by mistreating one another, they were profaning the covenant God made with their fathers. This is a warning to us. When God makes us one with Him, His Son, and each other, He expects us to act like it. The commandment to love God with all our heart and strength is the greatest commandment (Mt. 22:37–38), but the second greatest commandment is that we should love one another as ourselves (Mt. 22:39). Malachi’s message for us is that if we are not loving one another as we love ourselves, if we are not treating each other rightly, then we are profaning this New Covenant, as the Israelites profaned the Old.

Note #2: Sinners who are crafty and are set on doing evil will use the failures of God’s people as justification to refuse Him and despise His ways. When King David sinned with Bathsheba, the prophet Nathan told him, “You have given the enemies of the Lord great occasion to blaspheme” (2Sam. 12:14). God’s enemies were already blaspheming the name of the Lord, but David’s sin made them feel justified in doing so. God justly held David accountable for boosting the Gentiles’ zeal in blaspheming God.

Note: Both James and Paul warned New Testament saints of this cunning evil. This crafty, “demonic wisdom” will lead a soul to worship among the saints as if his relationship with God is right, while living an ungodly life. Such worship of evildoers is something God especially hates (Prov. 28:9; 15:8).

Proverbs 28

Proverbs 15

When Solomon said that the prayers and sacrifices of wicked people are abhorrent to God, he was telling us that, first of all, wicked people do sometimes pray and worship God. We need to ponder that, lest we find ourselves among them, walking in wicked wisdom in order to maintain an appearance that is contrary to the condition of our hearts. James warned the saints not to come into the presence of God’s glory with secret sins (Jas. 3:14), and in 1Corinthians, Paul described some of the sad results of not heeding this wise warning:

1Corinthians 11

In Revelation 3:15–16, Jesus described such believers as “lukewarm” and said he would vomit them out of his mouth; that is, he would cast them out of the body of Christ. He told those saints that he wished they would be either hot or cold. His first choice would be that we love him and his Father and enjoy the benefits of fellowship with them. But if we will not do that, he would rather we openly hate him. That is preferable to hating him in our hearts, and yet, worshipping with his people as though we loved him sincerely.

Note: This is the third judgment from God that God’s people rejected. Malachi tells them that God is not accepting their sacrifices, but they cannot believe such a thing. Like Samson, they had drifted so far from a right relationship with God that they did not even realize that He was no longer involved in their worship.

Judges 16

Samson did “go out as at other times before”, but the results of his going out to fight the Philistines were far from what they had been before because God had departed from him. God was gone and Samson’s strength was gone, but Samson did not know it!

Once, my late Uncle Joe walked into his godly mother’s home and found her weeping. When he asked her what was wrong, she told him that she could not pray for his father and oldest brother any more. Then she looked at the young Uncle Joe and added, “But I can still pray for you.” Her connection with God was so real that she knew when there was no more use in praying.

Of course, she could have mouthed some words, and to onlookers, it would have sounded like she was praying, but the mere appearance of prayer is not prayer!

Would we know it if God stopped hearing our prayers for someone? Is our fellowship with God that real to us?

The priests to whom Malachi was speaking did not believe that Malachi was a true prophet sent by God to them. They did not believe that Malachi was speaking for God when he told them that God was not accepting their sacrifices. The smoke of their sacrifices went up into the sky just as it had always done; the altar was the same; the fire behaved as it had always behaved as it consumed their offerings. Therefore, based on all observable criteria, God was still accepting their sacrifices. They would have thought there was no basis for the outrageous criticism of Malachi. What evidence could he present in support of his theory? But Malachi had no theory, and the criticism of the priests was not his.

In the book of Numbers, Israel was given a way to determine if a woman had been unfaithful. In this ritual, the priest gave the accused woman holy water to drink, mixed with dust from the floor of the temple. If she was innocent, nothing would happen to her (and her accusing husband would be put to shame), but if she was guilty, her reproductive organs would be cursed, and she would become barren (Num. 5:11–31). In this ritual, all observable criteria were the same. The people involved were always husband and wife; the water was the same; the dust from the temple floor was the same; the earthen vessel from which the woman drank was the same. But the results were different; the guilty were exposed and condemned, and the innocent were proved publicly to be so. And the different results were brought about by invisible realities; they were dependent upon the condition of the woman’s heart, whether it was guilty or pure. Invisible realities are not invisible to God. Their invisibility to mortals does not make realities less real.

It was a strange experience for me as a young man in the Lord to hear an elderly lady worship God in a heavenly language and to discern in the Spirit that God was not accepting her worship. Her praise sounded like the praise that arose to God from hearts that I knew were pure, and she acted the way righteous people acted when they were praising the Lord. But there was something invisible about her that was displeasing to God. I was very young in the Lord, but I had matured enough by that time to sense what God was feeling about her praise, although she was oblivious to it and probably would have been insulted if I had told her what I felt. On another occasion, years later in a meeting of happy saints, I looked toward one brother dancing among them, and I suddenly felt a strong displeasure from the Spirit. He looked like someone happy in Jesus; he even smiled like the others there; but there was something else about him, just as real, that could not be seen: hidden sin (which not long after came to light). But he was blind as to how God felt about his hypocritical dancing.

Blind to the truth that the moral condition of the hearts is the determining factor in worship being accepted, the priests of Malachi’s time, to their own damnation, fooled themselves and misled others. They put on the same holy garments that righteous priests had done before them, and they thought that was good enough. It certainly appeared to be good enough. What else was there to consider? Why would Malachi even think to say such things to them? God’s answer was given immediately.

Note #1: In God’s eyes, when His people marry those who are not His people, the offspring of that marriage are unclean. In preparing a people for the coming of His Son, God wanted Israelites to marry fellow Israelites, or marry foreigners who had come to Israel and embraced God and His law, as in the cases of Ruth the Moabitess and Uriah the Hittite. It was a horrible crime in God’s sight for Israel to mingle their holy seed with the seed of the heathen, as in the days of Ezra:

Ezra 9

This was not just an Old Testament attitude toward marriage between saints and sinners. When dealing with the issue of marriage between believers and non-believers, Paul made it clear that God still felt as He did during Ezra’s time. Paul warned believers not to marry unbelievers, adding that the children of such a union are unclean unless the unbeliever follows the believing spouse to Christ and is sanctified (1Cor. 7:12–14).

Note #2: God condemns these priests for allowing themselves to be seduced by ungodly, foreign women. It is self-evident that women of the world concentrate on knowing how to promote themselves with seductive appearances. Consequently, in the main, they are better at that deviousness than are the innocent daughters of God. Jesus touched on this when he said, “The children of this world are, in their generation, wiser than the children of light” (Lk. 16:8). In other words, sinners are better at methods of self-promotion and self-aggrandizement than are the saints who keep their minds on the things of God. Worldly women are consumed with how they may best adorn themselves, but God’s daughters are consumed with how they may best adorn the gospel. And that is beautiful – to those who have eyes to see. God’s daughters understand that “favor is deceitful, and beauty is fleeting, but a woman who fears the Lord shall be praised” (Prov. 31:30).

When servants of God fail to control their fleshly appetites, cunning women of the world become to them like the Sirens of ancient mythology who lured passing seamen onto deadly rocks with their irresistibly seductive songs. In other words, the sons of God become foolish and begin to pursue the daughters of men. And to cover their sin, they often invent doctrines to justify their treachery against their God-given wives, such as the following two doctrines, which God hates.

Note #1: This fourth judgment from God that God’s people found completely unbelievable has to do with these two perverse teachings invented by their ministers in order to excuse their sin. The first was the doctrine that God considers those who do evil to be good, and the second doctrine held that God is a God of love only, never of judgment. These two doctrines are still held by many who profess to belong to God. In Christian garb now, these two false doctrines allure the foolish into paths fraught with spiritual danger.

The first of these errors is the Christian doctrine that holds that God delights in those who are His even when they are rebellious and sinful. Those who teach this say that once people are washed from their sins by the blood of Christ and enter into the family of God, God no longer sees them as sinners even though they continue sinning. As some say, “God can’t see through the blood [of Christ].” They base this comment on the notion that God is so holy that He cannot look at sin, perhaps because of one prophet’s comment, “Your eyes are too pure to see evil, and cannot look upon trouble” (Hab. 1:13a). But the same prophet goes on to say in the same verse, “Why do you look at the faithless, and remain silent when the wicked swallows the man more righteous than he?” (Hab. 1:13b). Also, they note that while dying on the cross, Jesus cried out, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”, claiming that this was the very moment that Jesus became sin for us, and, so, God turned His head away from His Son. But that cry of desperation was made only because Jesus was in such agony that he felt forsaken, not because God had actually forsaken him. God “bowed the heavens” to be near His suffering Son (Ps. 18:6–9); He was closer, physically, to Jesus during Jesus’ agony on the cross than He was at any other time during Jesus’ life on earth.

God sees everything all the time, as Solomon said, “The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good” (Prov. 15:3). Do not be fooled by crafty sermons. God does not delight in His children who are living in sin, and they are not good in His sight. And He will hold every one of them accountable for their transgressions. In fact, because they are His children, He will hold them more accountable than anyone else (Amos 3:2).

Note #2: The second error has to do with understanding the God we serve. Israel had “wearied” God with the notion that “God is love” – and nothing else. But God is a God of love only when it is time to love. When it is time to hate, God is a God of hate. When it is time to fight, God is a God of war. When it is time to heal, God is a God of healing. When it is time to afflict, God is a God of affliction. God is whatever it is time for Him to be. He is always whatever He wants to be. God is the God of whatever we need. He is all things to His people. Perhaps that is why the best name He could have is simply, “I Am”, as He said to Moses:

Exodus 3

If God were love and nothing else, then what was Jesus talking about when he strictly warned his disciples to fear God (Lk. 12:5)? If God were love and nothing else, then it was nonsense for the man of God to say, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). If God were love and nothing else, then Paul was being foolish to be terrified at the thought of God’s wrath (2Cor. 5:11). What kind of terror can a God of love and nothing else inspire?

Since God never changes (as Malachi says in 3:6), then God has always been love. And if God has always been love, then when He cursed the human race with death, He was love, and when He destroyed the earth with a flood, He was love. And if God does not change, then in the Final Judgment, when God consigns untold millions to eternal death, He will still be love.

Where is the God of judgment? Find the God of love, and you will find Him.